Thread

gm the censorship resistant social media nostr requires fully tunneled vpn to access from china because most of relays and clients are blocked by GFW. and you're compromising your whole terminal's internet connection especially for the china based services. so practically there's no way a user in china could frequently use nostr like they could access Twitter via eg, partially Sockes5 proxy, if they don't build their own relay and aggregation server. ironically, standard vpns like Nordvpn is totally not accessible because they don't use any obfuscation for their WG alike tunnel and it's easily blocked. Mullvad is great and accessible even tho the GFW is clearly easier to block its traffic.

Replies (6)

I don't know enough about Tor, but I'll ask anyway: While I'm too scared to run a Tor exit node, I wonder if we could all help the Chinese people by running what I might call a Tor "entry node"? The idea is that we all run something that can help the Chinese to access Tor, by forwarding connections to Tor. We could hide them inside our normal websites, so that connections to this entry node look like typical HTTPS connections. We could be motivated to run these via bitcoin, where the users have to pay small amounts of bitcoin if they want a high bandwidth connection. If we all run these, then the Great Firewall would have to block very many entire websites ( @c03rad0r )
↩ replying to c03rad0r
Many systems (including bitcoind) don't directly have Tor support built in and they instead connect to a local socks5 proxy which is exposed by the Tor instance which is running locally too. So, after a little LLM research, here's what I'm thinking that somebody could do: - Run the above, but expose the socks5 proxy to the internet. This exposes a socks5 proxy which directly forwards the request into Tor. - But tweak the sock5 proxy so that it requires cashu spilman payments - Now, given that we need a custom client which sends the payments, which can also encrypt the connection to socks5: image (but maybe that's exactly what epoxy did 😀)
↩ replying to SatsAndSports
Yes it sounds a lot like epoxy. Epoxy could probably still benefit spillman channels and more adoption though..
GitHub
GitHub - Origami74/nostr-epoxy-reverse-proxy: Are operating a relay NERP yet? Use this Nostr Epoxy Reverse Proxy to allow clients to proxy through your relay and earn sats.
Are operating a relay NERP yet? Use this Nostr Epoxy Reverse Proxy to allow clients to proxy through your relay and earn sats. - Origami74/nostr-ep...